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LeoFaraon wrote:But when Cooper enters the lodge in ep.29, it was the audience who had been "put to sleep", for the bad, by the the direction the show had taken until then; but also for the good, by Lynch, the magician.

I couldn't disagree with you more. I don't see that that season 2 was as bad as you say. And when I've heard Frost speak in an unedited format, he is very complimentary of DL even as he acknowledges DL unique creative process.

You might overthinking all this.

Sloclub, I don't think you'll convince many active posters here about this. It seems that the majority (?) subscribe to the "Season 2 went horribly wrong" mantra. I personally don't, as you may well know by know.

I'm always fascinated by background stories and behind-the-scenes tales, however I do feel that there is a point where over analysis actually impairs the ability to enjoy the work on its' own merits, which is why I have no interest in digging the dirt on who potentially fell out with and/or upset who during production.

Thanks for the support Red Room. At least some of us are open minded enough to trust the show as a whole to entertain and maybe even enlighten.

I disagree that this writer or that director "ruined" TP. I think what happened was that the mass audience got put out with a story that wasn't "logical" enough for them. Remember the zeitgeit, TP was a totally new and overwhelming experience for most people conditioned to respond to Murder She Wrote, or Hart to Hart, or Spenser For Hire. Those were detective shows to them, the mass market. Think of the truly poor writing- no plot hole too big, the music- usually disco or something to evoke cosy type mysteries, the way the shows looked. Now image what it was like when something original came on- Twin Peaks! Everything from the characters, the music, the events. And most of all, it was a show about people with all their faults and foilibles. Characters not only mourned for Larua Palmer, they mourned for themselves through her death. That was deep.

I think it was hard for the mass audience to put into words what they thought. So they and the lazy critics put the "quirky", "illogical" and I can't remember what other labels but people started panning the show. And most of them blamed David Lynch. Unfortunately he took the brunt of the blame for people not understanding something so different.

What happened to us, the fans, is that in an effort to make excuses for more people not loving TP the way we do, some of us, the majority perhaps, started blaming others; network suits, Mark Frost, anyone but Lynch.

I think it's time to reevaluate TP on it's own merits. First let's put our shared cultural memory aside and take a fresh look at TP. The first people to benefit will be us, the fans. We can sort everyone else out later.

Through the darkness of futures past,
the magician longs to see
One chants out,
between two worlds,
fire walk with me.

sloclub wrote:Thanks for the support Red Room. At least some of us are open minded enough to trust the show as a whole to entertain and maybe even enlighten.

Having a different opinion doesn't mean someone isn't "open minded"...but being unable to tolerate a differing opinion might mean that.

Leo's analysis is thorough and well thought-out. He's drawing in part from the Nochimson book, The Passion of David Lynch. She argues that the committee-like nature of the show (creative input from Lynch, Frost, et al.) leads to clashing motives and ideas of the characters. The various story arcs reveal this dissonance.

IMHO, FWIW - much as we all love to tease apart the finer details and motives of Lynch's work, analyse it and search for answers, there certainly is a great deal of "overthinking" going on in a variety of discussions (not necessarily on here). Naturally, this is initially prompted by seeming paradoxes and difficulties in conventional characterisation / narrative, and made all the more urgent by Lynch's wonderful refusal to open up and engage about certain topics. Nothing makes an obsessive need to "understand" an auteur's work more frenzied than an auteur who throws semi-autistic red-herrings and garbled evasions at his admirers!

LeoF certainly does elaborate upon Nochimson's theories well, and it is interesting to see people articulating core ideas from her work, as opposed to, say, the really weak critical efforts by writers such as John Alexander. At the same time, I also find Nochimson so stubbornly convinced about identifying the "subconscious" / "nonrational" with the feminine, that she makes her own work reductive, simplistic and in danger of turning useful archetypal gender attributions into overarching sources of inspiration for nearly all of the core elements of Lynch's oeuvre. It strikes me that although most of what she says about the overturning of classic gender roles / expectations present in his movies is fascinating, there is a distinct lack of discussion of Eastern spirituality and its relation to "letting go", and that not everything that is "nonrational" or that speaks to the "subconscious" has to be immediately identified with the "feminine", however useful these binary archetypes may be in practice.

With good command of language, it is possible to find correspondences between all sorts of disparate symbols and elements, and unite them together under one feasible theory. Ironically, of course, Nochimson is the one who returns time and time again to the idea of the inadequacy of logocentrism, the ability of words to communicate deeper truths more immediately, the problem of mediation and representation, and so on... and yet she treads that line herself, by relying in the end mostly on what she deems to be "realist", "illusionist", "male", "rational" and "closed" in order to communicate her extremely repetitive notions of how nearly all the significant moments in classic Lynch highlight the opposite, before they point to a new mode of communicative optimism. Hmmmm.

One poster on the Inland Empire board, who may be on here too, regularly writes reams and reams of genuinely interesting analysis on the film, and in fact appears to command the ranks and stamp his mind upon nearly all of the alternatives put forward, most eloquently. However, after a while one gets the impression that people like this are terrified of proliferating symbolism, intertextuality, profusion of meanings, or heterogeneity in general (as Nochimson might point out) and simply have to devote enormous amounts of time and energy into "nailing" something that need not be confined easily or have been so carefully thought-out in the first place.

I watched it on a big screen TV. I didn't see a problem with it. I watched ep 29 twice and I could see everything. There is a big difference between me and Dugpa. B- you indicate you've seen TP on other media, specially laser disk. I haven't. This is my 1st time to see Season 2 in 15 years so I have no memory of seeing it elsewhere to draw on. If there are better transfers out there I haven't seen them so I have nothing to compare it to.

Who do we write to at Paramount to ask for what we want on the Complete Mystery?

If I had to guess, I'll bet the season one stuff is going to be a downgrade. No audio commentary and the transfers will probably not be the same, probably not sound or look as good (I don't know anything about who owns the rights to the transfers to the 2001 set so I'm guessing they'd just redo it), definitely no DTS and I'm betting no 2.0 English, and three hours per DVD. They will probably include new director/crew interviews for the new season one discs a la season two (maybe Mark Frost?) but just one per disc. Those are just realistic expectations, anything more is wishful. I bet we will get a lot more interview material from the cast though on a special features disc and MAYBE a documentary about the show, but that's iffy.

The one thing I hope for is a new David Lynch interview, but 1) he apparently dislikes doing interviews and 2) he doesn't talk about Twin Peaks too much.

Leo, I saw your comment on the "orange tinge" of season one. I actually REALLY liked the warm look they gave it and it kind of sucks it was gone in season two.

The orange tinge was intentional on DL's part. He wanted to create a warm friendly atmosphere for the show so the film editors dialed in a little more red per DL. It's on one of the interviews or commentary tracks, I can't remember which.

Leo, I bought R1 of both seasons. I'm watching on a small screen, too: 26 inch, I think, so I dare say many of the compression problems will pass me by... It's quite a while since I last watched S1 ep.2, but I may go back and check out the Red Room scene now that you mention it.